where past meets future

Tag Archives: Ynval Harari

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present system is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. (241)

The above is a quote from Ynval Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which I reviewed last time. So that’s his view of history, but what of other fields specifically designed to give us a handle on the future, you know, the kinds of “future studies” futurists claim to be experts in, fields like scenario planning, or even some versions of science-fiction.

Harari probably wouldn’t put much credence on the ability of these fields to predict the future either. The reason being that there are very real epistemological limits to what we can know outside of a limited number of domains. The reason we are unable to make the same sort of accurate predictions for areas such as history, politics or economics as we do for physics, is that all of the former are examples of Level II chaotic systems. A Level I chaotic system is one where small differences in conditions can result in huge differences in outcomes. Weather is the best example we have of Level I chaos, which is why nearly everyone has at some point in their life wanted to bludgeon the weatherman with his umbrella. Level II chaotic systems make the job of accurate prediction even harder, for, as Harari points out:

Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. (240)

Level II chaos is probably the source of many of our philosophical paradoxes regarding, what we can really know, along with free will and its evil deterministic twin, not to mention the kinds of paradoxes we encounter when contemplating time travel, issues we only seem able to resolve in a way that conserves the underlying determinism of nature with our subjective experience of freedom when we assume that there are a multiple or even infinite number of universe that together manifest every possibility. A solution that seems to violate every fiber of our common sense.

Be all that as it may, the one major disappointment of Harari’s Sapiens was his versions of possible futures for humanity,though expressed with full acknowledgement that they were just well reasoned guesses, really weren’t all that different from what we all know already. Maybe we’ll re-engineer our genes even to the point of obtaining biological immortality. Maybe we’ll merge with our machines and become cyborgs. Maybe our AI children will replace us.

It’s not that these are unlikely futures, just commonly held ones, and thinkers who have arrived at them have just as often as not done so without having looked deep into the human past, merely extrapolating from current technological trends. Harari might instead have used his uncovering of the deep past to go in a different direction, not so much to make specific predictions about how the human story will likely end, but to ascertain broad recurring patterns that might narrow down the list of things we should look for in regards to our movement towards the future, and, above all, things whose recurrence we would do best to guard ourselves against.

At least one of these recurring trends identified in Sapiens we should be on the look out for is the Sisyphean character of our actions. We gained numbers and civilization with the Agricultural Revolution, but lost in the process both our health and our freedom, and this Sisyphean aspect did not end with industrialization and the scientific revolution. The industrial revolution that ended our universal scarcity, threatens to boil us all. Our automation of labor has lead us to be crippled by our sedentary lifestyles, our conquest of famine has resulted in widespread obesity, and our vastly expanded longevity has resulted in an epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

At least some of these problems we will be able to anticipate in advance and because of this they call for neither the precautionary principle of environmentalist, nor the proactionary principle of Max More, but something I’ll call the Design Foresight Principle (DFP). If we used something like the DFP we would design to avoid ethical and other problems that emerge from technology or social policy before they arrive, or at least before a technology is widely adopted. Yet in many cases even a DFP wouldn’t help us because the problem arising from a technology or policy wasn’t obvious until afterward- a classic case of which was DDT’s disastrous effect on bird populations.

This situation where we create something or act in some way in order to solve one problem which in turn causes another isn’t likely a bug, but a deep feature of the universe we inhabit. It not going to go away completely regardless of the extent of our powers. Areas I’d look for this Sisyphean character of human life to rear its head over the next century would include everything from biotechnology, to geoengineering, and even quite laudable attempts to connect the world’s remaining billions in one overarching network.

Again far-fetched at the moment, other forms of oppression may be far less viscerally troubling but almost just as bad. As both neural monitoring and the ability to control subjects through optogenetics increases, we might see the rise of “part-time” slavery where one’s freedom is surrendered on the job, or in certain countries perhaps the revival of the institution itself.

The solution here, I think, is to start long before such possibilities manifest themselves, especially in countries with less robust protections regarding worker, human, and animal rights and push hard for research and social policy towards solutions to problems such as the dearth of organs for human beings in need of them that would have the least potentially negative impact on human rights.

Part of the answer to also needs to be in the form of regulation to protect workers from the creep of now largely innocent efforts such as the quantified self movement and its technologies into areas that really would put individual autonomy at risk. The development of near human level AI would seem to be the ultimate solution for human on human oppression, though at some point in the intelligence of our machines, we are might again face the issue of one group of sentient beings oppressing another group for its exclusive benefit.

One seemingly broad trend that I think Harari misidentifies is what he sees as the inexorable move towards a global empire. He states it this way:

Over millennia, small simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilizations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures each of which is bigger and more complex. (166)

Since around 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires. It seems likely that in the future, too, most human will live in one. But this time the empire will truly be global. The imperial vision of domination over the entire world could be imminent. (207)

Yet I am far from certain that the movement towards a world empire or state is one that can be seen when we look deep into history. Since their beginnings, empires have waxed and waned. No empire with the scale and depth of integration now stands where the Persian, Roman, or Inca empires once stood. Rather than an unstoppable march towards larger and larger political units we have the rise and collapse of these units covering huge regions.

For the past 500 years the modern age of empires which gave us our globalized world has been a play of ever shifting musical chairs with the Spanish, Portuguese followed by the British and French followed by failed bids by the Germans and the Japanese, followed by the Russians and Americans.

For a quarter century now America has stood alone, but does anyone seriously doubt that this is much more than an interim until the likes of China and India join it? Indeed, the story of early 21st century geopolitics could easily be told as a tale of the limits of American empire.

Harari seems to think a global ruling class is about to emerge on the basis of stints at US universities and hobnobbing at Davos. This is to forget the power of artificial boundaries such as borders, and imagined communities. As scholars of nationalism such as Benedict Anderson have long pointed out you can get strengthened national identity when you combine a lingua franca with a shared education as long as personal opportunities for advancement are based upon citizenship.

Latin American creoles who were denied administrative positions even after they had proven themselves superior to their European-Spanish classmates were barred from becoming members of the elite in Spain itself and thus returned home with a heightened sense of national identity. And just as long as American universities remain the premier educational institutions on earth, which will not be forever, the elite children of other countries will come there for education. They will then have to choose whether to sever their ties with their home country and pursue membership in the American elite, or return home to join the elite of their home country with only tenuous ties to the values of the global power. They will not have the choice to chose both.

Indeed, the only way Harari’s global elite might emerge as a ruling class would be for states to fail almost everywhere. It wouldn’t be the victory of the trend towards “domination over the entire world” but a kind of global neo-feudal order. That is, the two trends we should be looking to history to illuminate when it comes to the future of political order is the much older trend of the rise and fall of empires, or the much younger 500 year trend of the rise and fall of great powers based on states.

One trend that might bolster the chances towards either neo-feudalism or the continued dominance of rival states depending upon how it plays out is the emergence of new forms of money. The management of a monetary system, enforcement of contacts, and protection of property, has always been among the state’s chief functions. As Harari showed us, money, along with writing and mathematics were invented as bureaucratic tools of accounting and management. Yet since the invention of money there has always been this tension between the need for money as a way to facilitate exchange – for which it has to be empty of any information except its value, and the need to record and enforce loans in that medium of exchange- loans and contacts.

This tension between forgetfulness and remembering when it comes to money is one way to see the tug of war between inflation and deflation in the management of it. States that inflate their currency are essentially voting for money has a means of facilitating exchange over the need for money to preserve its values so that past loans and contracts can be met in full.

Digital currencies, of which Bitcoin is only one example, and around which both states and traditional banks are (despite Bitcoin’s fall) are showing increasing interest, by treating money as data allow it to fully combine these two functions as a medium of exchange that can remember. This could either allow states to crush non-state actors, such as drug cartels, that live off the ability of money to forget its origins, or conversely, strengthen those actors (mostly from the realm of business) who claim there is no need for a state because digital currency can make contracts self enforcing. Imagine that rather than money you simply have a digital account which you can only borrow from to make a purchase once it connects itself to a payment system that will automatically withdraw increments until some set date in the future. And imagine that such digital wallets are the only form of money that is actually functional.

There are other trends from deep history we should look to as well to get a sense of what the future may have in store. For instance, the growth of human power has been based not on individual intelligence, but collective organization. New forms of organization using technologies like brain-nets might become available at some future date, and based on the scalability of these technologies might prove truly revolutionary. This will be no less important than the kinds of collective myths that predominate in the future, which, religious or secular will likely continue to determine how we live our lives as they have in the past.

Yet perhaps the most important trend from the deep past for the future will be the one Harari thinks might end desire to make history at all. Where will we go with our mastery over the biochemical keys to our happiness which we formerly sought in everything from drugs to art? It’s a question that deserves a post all to itself.

One thing that can certainly not be said either the anthropologist Ynval Harari’s or his new book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that they lack ambition. In Sapiens, Harari sets out to tell the story of humanity since our emergence on the plans of Africa until the era in which we are living right now today, a period he thinks is the beginning of the end of our particular breed of primate. His book ends with some speculations on our post-human destiny, whether we achieve biological immortality or manage to biologically and technologically engineer ourselves into an entirely different species. If you want to talk about establishing a historical context for the issues confronted by transhumanism, you can’t get better than that.

In Sapiens, Harari organizes the story of humanity by casting it within the framework of three revolutions: the cognitive, the agricultural and the scientific. The Cognitive Revolution is what supposedly happened somewhere between 70,000- 30,000 thousand years ago when a suddenly very creative and cooperative homo sapiens came roaring out of Africa using their unprecedented social coordination and technological flexibility to invade every ecological niche on the planet.

Armed with an extremely cooperative form of culture, and the ability to make tools, (especially clothing) to fit environments they had not evolved for, homo sapiens was able to move into more northern latitudes than their much more cold adapted Neanderthal cousins, or to cast out on the seas to settle far off islands and continents such as Australia, Polynesia, and perhaps even the Americas.

The speed with which homo sapiens invaded new territory was devastating for almost all other animals. Harari points out how the majority of large land animals outside of Africa (where animals had enough time to evolve weariness of this strange hairless ape) disappeared not long after human beings arrived there. And the casualties included other human species as well.

One of the best things about Harari is his ability to overthrow previous conceptions- as he does here with the romantic notion held by some environmentalist that “primitive” cultures lived in harmony with nature. Long before even the adoption of agriculture, let alone the industrial revolution, the arrival of homo sapiens proved devastating for every other species, including other hominids.

Yet Harari also defies intellectual stereotypes. He might not think the era in which the only human beings on earth were “noble savages” was a particularly good one for other species, but he does see it as having been a particularly good one for homo sapiens, at least compared to what came afterward, and up until quite recently.

Humans, in the era before the Agricultural Revolution lived a healthier lifestyle than any since. They had a varied diet, and though they only worked on average six hours a day, and were far more active than any of us in modern societies chained to our cubicles and staring at computer screens.

Harari, also throws doubt on the argument that has been made most recently by Steven Piker, that the era before states was one of constant tribal warfare and violence, suggesting that it’s impossible to get an overall impression for levels of violence based on what end up being a narrow range of human skeletal remains. The most likely scenario, he thinks, is that some human societies before agriculture were violent, and some were not, and that even the issue of which societies were violent varied over time rising and falling in respect to circumstances.

From the beginning of the Cognitive Revolution up until the Agricultural Revolution starting around 10,000 years ago things were good for homo sapiens, but as Harari sees it, things really went downhill for us as individuals, something he sees as different from our status as a species, with the rise of farming.

Harari is adamant that while the Agricultural Revolution may have had the effect of increasing our numbers, and gave us all the wonders of civilization and beauty of high culture, its price, on the bodies and minds of countless individuals, both humans, and other animals was enormous. Peasants were smaller, less healthy, and died younger than their hunter gatherer ancestors. The high culture of the elites of ancient empires was bought at the price of the systematic oppression of the vast majority of human beings who lived in those societies. And, in the first instance of telling this tale with in the context of a global history of humanity that I can think of, Harari tells the story of not just our oppression of each other, but of our domesticated animals as well.

He shows us how inhumane animal husbandry was long before our era of factory farming, which is even worse, but it was these more “natural”, “organic” farmers who began practices such as penning animals in cages, separating mothers from their young, castrating males, and cutting off the noses or out the eyes of animals such a pigs so they could better serve their “divinely allotted” function of feeding human mouths and stomachs.

Yet this begs the question: if the Agricultural Revolution was so bad for the vast majority of human beings, and animals with the exception of a slim class at the top of the pyramid, why did it not only last, but spread, until only a tiny minority of homo sapiens in remote corners continued to be hunter gatherers while the vast majority, up until quite recently were farmers?

Harari doesn’t know. It was probably a very gradual process, but once human societies had crossed a certain threshold there was no going back- our numbers were simply too large to support a reversion to hunting and gathering, For one of the ironies of the Agricultural Revolution is that while it made human beings unhealthy, it also drove up birthrates. This probably happened through rational choice. A hunter gathering family would likely space their children, whereas a peasant family needed all the hands it could produce, something that merely drove the need for more children, and was only checked by the kinds of famines Malthus had pegged as the defining feature of agricultural societies and that we only escaped recently via the industrial revolution.

Perhaps, as Harrai suggest, “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” (81) At the only level evolution cares about- the propagation of our genes- wheat was a benefit to humanity, but at the cost of much human suffering and backbreaking labor in which we rid wheat of its rivals and spread the plant all over the globe. The wheat got a better deal, no matter how much we love our toast.

It was on the basis of wheat, and a handful of other staple crops (rice, maize, potatoes) that states were first formed. Harari emphasizes the state’s role as record keeper, combined with enforcer of rules. The state saw its beginning as a scorekeeper and referee for the new complex and crowded societies that grew up around farming.

All the greatest works of world literature, not to mention everything else we’ve ever read, can be traced back to this role of keeping accounts, of creating long lasting records, that led the nascent states that grew up around agriculture to create writing. Shakespeare’s genius can trace its way back to the 7th century B.C. equivalent to an IRS office. Along with writing the first states also created numbers and mathematics, bureaucrats have been bean counters ever since.

The quirk of human nature that for Harari made both the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolution possible and led to much else besides was our ability to imagine things that do not exist, by which he means almost everything we find ourselves surrounded by, not just religion, but the state and its laws, and everything in between has been akin to a fantasy game. Indeed, Harari left me feeling that the whole of both premodern and modern societies was at root little but a game of pretend played by grown ups, with adulthood perhaps nothing more than agreeing to play along with the same game everyone else is engaged in. He was especially compelling and thought provoking when it came to that ultimate modern fantasy and talisman that all of us, from Richard Dawkins to, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi believes in; namely money.

For Harari the strange thing is that: “Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.” In this respect it is “the apogee of human tolerance” (186). Why then have so many of its critics down through the ages denounced money as the wellspring human of evil? He explains the contradiction this way:

For although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and the impersonal systems that back it. We do not trust the stranger or the next store neighbor- we trust the coins they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust. (188)

We ourselves don’t live in the age of money, so much as the age of Credit (or capital), and it is this Credit which Harari sees as one of the legs of the three-legged stools which he think defines our own period of history. For him we live in the age of the third revolution in human history, the age of the Scientific Revolution that has followed his other two. It is an age built out of an alliance of the forces of Capital-Science- and Empire.

What has made our the age of Credit and different from the material cultures that have come before where money certainly played a prominent role, is that we have adopted lending as the route to economic expansion. But what separates us from past eras that engaged in lending as well, is that ours is based on a confidence that the future will be not just different but better than the past, a confidence that has, at least so far, panned out over the last two centuries largely through the continuous advances in science and technology.

The feature that really separated the scientific revolution from earlier systems of knowledge, in Harari’s view, grew out of the recognition in the 17th century of just how little we actually knew:

The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has above all been a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. (251)

Nothing perhaps better captures the early modern recognition of this ignorance than their discovery of the New World which began us down our own unique historical path towards Empire. Harari sees both Credit and Science being fed and feeding the intermediary institution of Empire, and indeed, that the history of capitalism along with science and technology cannot be understood without reference to the way the state and imperialism have shaped both.

The imperialism of the state has been necessary to enable the penetration of capitalism and secure its gains, and the powers of advanced nations to impose these relationships has been the result largely of more developed science and technology which the state itself has funded. Science was also sometimes used not merely to understand the geography and culture of subject peoples to exploit them, but in the form of 19th century and early 20th century racism was used as a justification for that racism itself. And the quest for globe spanning Empire that began with the Age of Exploration in the 15th century is still ongoing.

Where does Harari think all this is headed?

Over millennia, small simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilizations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures each of which is bigger and more complex. (166)

Since around 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires. It seems likely that in the future, too, most human will live in one. But this time the empire will truly be global. The imperial vision of domination over the entire world could be imminent. (207)

Yet Harari questions not only whether the scientific revolution or the new age of economic prosperity, not to mention the hunt for empire, have actually brought about a similar amount of misery, if not quite suffering, as the Agricultural Revolution that preceded it.

After all, the true quest of modern science is really not power, but immortality. In Harari’s view we are on the verge of fulfilling the goal of the “Gilgamesh Project”.

Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death. Instead, they are busy investigating the physiological, hormonal and genetic systems responsible for disease and old age. They are developing new medicines, revolutionary treatments and artificial organs that will lengthen our lives and might one day vanquish the Grim Reaper himself. (267)

The quest after wealth, too, seems to be reaching a point of diminishing returns. If the objective of material abundance was human happiness, we might ask why so many of us are miserable? The problem, Harari thinks, might come down to biologically determined hedonic set-points that leave a modern office worker surrounded by food and comforts ultimately little happier to his peasant ancestor who toiled for a meager supper from sunset to sunrise. Yet perhaps the solution to this problem is at our fingertips as well:

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today when we realize that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics, social reforms, putsches, and ideologies and focus instead on the only thing that truly makes us happy: manipulating our biochemistry. (389)

Still, even should the Gilgamesh Project succeed, or we prove capable of mastering our biochemistry, Harari sees a way the Sisyphean nature may continue to have the last laugh. He writes:

Suppose that science comes up with cures for all diseases, effective anti-ageing therapies and regenerative treatments that keep people indefinitely young. In all likelihood, the immediate result will be an epidemic of anger and anxiety.

Those unable to afford the new treatments- the vast majority of people- will be besides themselves with rage. Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even handed- that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor will not be comfortable with the thought that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful.

But the tiny minority able to afford the new treatments will not be euphoric either. They will have much to be anxious about. Although the new therapies could extend life and youth they will not revive corpses. How dreadful to think that I and my loved ones can live forever, but only if we don’t get hit by a truck or blown to smithereens by a terrorist! Potentially a-mortal people are likely to grow adverse to taking even the slightest risk, and the agony of losing a spouse, child or close friend will be unbearable.( 384-385).

Along with this, Harari reminds us that it might not be biology that is most important for our happiness, but our sense of meaning. Given that he thinks all of our sources of meaning are at bottom socially constructed illusions, he concludes that perhaps the only philosophically defensible position might be some form of Buddhism- to stop all of our chasing after desire in the first place.

The real question is whether the future will show if all our grasping has ended up in us reaching our object or has led us further down the path of illusion and pain that we need to outgrow to achieve a different kind of transcendence.